QRZ Call Sign Lookup

Antennas are self sustaining

Antennas always warm my heart

In this age of on-demand, internet/wi-fi and cable services it always warms my heart to see an antenna still above the roof lines. Why you ask? Because antennas now stand for something that we’re moving away from as a society. The lone antenna is all that was once needed to get content into our living rooms. A finite investment of thirty dollars and an afternoon paid us back many times over in free content.

Many antennas now are simply the remnants of old analogue TV, rusted relics of a bygone age. Broadcast networks and the FCC turned their backs on analogue in the name of better service and the modern age. Valuable bandwidth now freed up so the FCC can make some money and the companies vying for these resources can mint money.

What warms my heart are the antennas that are up for other reasons, newer digital antennas for Broadcast TV and ham antennas. What antennas equal are a desire to remain independent of the big block providers like Time Warner Cable or others here in NYC.

I recently took an afternoon to build one of those coat hanger HDTV antennas that you find on YouTube. I wanted to see if we could survive with only broadcast TV if we so desired but my experiment was dashed by poor reception due to the many large skyscrapers in our location that blocked out any possible signals we might receive.

I will continue to think about alternatives to all monopolies in my life because there is something very American about being less connected to all of these metered services that seem to extract more and more of our hard earned cash.